I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Tracking Computer fit to the QOTW

Ship balancing is slowing down a bit because CCP Tallest is now the father of twins (congratulations, Tallest!). Someone joked that perhaps having more than one person doing ship balancing would be a good idea, to which CCP Soundwave replied:

We actually have three people dedicated to it now, the other two are just working on other areas (titan tracking, anyone?).

God, I hope you're kidding about this titan nerf business. It's a 100b+ isk ship. What do you think it SHOULD do? Have you ever tried to accumulate that kind of isk in game? From start to finish, everything about a titan is epic -- the cost, production time, risk involved, etc. I think it's been nerfed enough -- too much even. Shouldn't the outcome of all that work be something equally epic?

Imho make titans like combat recons with role bonus(es) for special e-war mods only they can use, likely a limit a of 1 or 2 of each mod to each titan. And change the SC and titan E-war immunity to 'General immunity' and the immune given by triage and seige to 'special immunity'. the Capital Ewar mods can pierce the general immunity but not the special immunity.

I think a big part of the problem is not the titans themselves, but the fact that there is nothing in between carriers and dreads and moms and titans. Introduce T2 dreads (maybe a marauder style and a super siege) and carriers (a combat/ewar platform and a super logistics/extra large SMA) that have ehp and cost balanced in the middle of the two groups (these wouldn't require sov to build, they would be expensive, but anyone could work towards getting them). Add capital scrams, neuts, tracking and drone bandwidth disrupters that can only be fit on caps and only effect other caps. This will hopefully open more strategic options for dealing with super cap blobs other than bringing a bigger blob, without drastically nerfing the biggest most expensive ships in the game and alienating the players who have made significant commitments to the game.

I dare say there are unsubscriptions with each and every major EVE update. Ultimately EVE is a complex game where we all find our niches and, for lack of a better word, exploit them to their fullest. When our niche gets eliminated or nerfed sometimes people just choose that moment to ditch the game. Since the 'Summer of Rage' I've been worried that CCP might have a deep seated fear of mass-unsubs and players will be able to abuse that fear to protect their little hobby-horse... seems these guys are trying that approach.

But I urge CCP not to think this way about a potential titan nerf for the following reasons;

There really aren't that many Titan owners and I doubt very much that all or even many of them will completely unsub. These are also the players that have massive industrial/economic support and can afford to play EVE without paying for subs. In effect - the economic impact of a titan nerf on CCP in real life is likely to be extremely limited or unoticable - and any loss of players will probably be offset by gains due to the change.

Anyone who is a single ship nerf away from quitting likely has many other reasons for being 'done' with the game. Giving a group of players an instakill button just to keep them in a game they otherwise don't want to play isn't fun and makes the other 50,000+ of us unhappy.

Players who own titans and threaten CCP with unsubbing represent the knife edge of the 'old guard'. These are the guys that have little time for new players, are entrenched in their game play style and are negative towards any sort of major change. I'd go so far as to say bittervet disease and titan ownership directly correlate. They also distort both the economy and the skill point dynamics away from a more n00b friendly mechanic since their accumulated 3+ years in the game creates incredibly inflated characters (financially and in SP).

Nobody is suggesting that titans shouldn't represent the money invested in them... but right now they are a ludicrous end game trophy with a following that effectively idolises them.

What about creating a new BS class that is specialized in killing Capital ships?

A vessel that has a specialized shield that can reduce the damage it takes from Capital guns and it can also fit guns that will dish out tremendous amount of damage against capital sized target while being somewhat ineffective against sub-capitals?

Unfortunately Titans with an assload of TCs and TEs can insta Inties and AFs with less than cruiser-sized sig radius... and the tier-3 BCs have, well, BC size sig radius and cruiser-size tank, basically (esp if fit as pure-gank glass cannons). Guess how well that goes vs a tracking fit Titan...

Its a very cool idea - although the thought of an additional damage dealing mechanic turns my stomach slightly when I imagine the SP overhead investing in it would probably cost given what the current training times are for missiles/beams etc.

My view on this, Jester, just having seen what I've seen the past couple years, knowing people and how they work... and having seen :CCP: in action, too... I can predict that EVE has already reached the tipping point and gone just a hair past it.Now we've hit the point at which the tower WILL topple, the only question is how long will that take and will :CCP: be smart and try to make the crash as slow and gradual as possible, or will this :newguy: fuck it all up and ride her "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" crashing into the ground...

I really truly regret that I missed the "prime" of EVE and only get to see the downfall now, for slower or faster. I guess right now I just focus on small ship skills and have fun trying to blast people in sub-BS hulls til it all goes down the toilet. :-D

To me it looks like CCP just doesn't know what to do with EvE. CCP is now fixing previous feature (which is good), but it seems to have given up on adding new ones. The only big idea on the EvE horizon is that *stuff* will happen between it and Dust 514.Which leads to me agree with Jester when he says EvE may become the tail of the Dust dog. The corollary of this, being EvE would not topple, but become an annex of Dust.

I'm not sure that is perhaps such a bad thing - after all it would free CCP up from being so financially dependent on EVE subscriptions. Then when a handful of bittervets suddenly declare "WOT... TITAN NERF... RAGE QUIT!!!" CCP can just move on and ignore them, since the subscriptions of 1000 EVE players is petty cash to the income of tens of thousands of PS3 gamers.

After the Summer of Rage they seem pretty cautious about making any significant changes to the game. I actually fear that when it comes to adding major new game mechanics they will be extremely constrained as their recent experiences of Incarna weren't at all positive. I'm all for 1 more patch of 'fixes', but come mid-end 2012 I'd like to see a pretty substantial new patch that adds new content.

Yeah. So somehow if you own a titan you should be immune to meta-risk. Say what?

I thought it was accepted by sensible players that at any time one of your activities could get the nerfbat (anom nerf, nano nerf to name a few). Diversify! If you have 100 bisk and the munnies EVE or no for a titan sitting account you can afford to have other characters that do other things.

Yeah, this is getting more than a little repulsive. We've got people in that thread saying "it's easy to make 100 billion ISK for a Titan." Well, yeah, if you have one already and a system to rat with it in risk-free, OF COURSE it's easy.

@Mara, sure, they were designed as alliance-level weaponry, but they are not used that way for a simple reason: even if it is the alliance that funded a titan, once a pilot sits in it the alliance no longer have any real control over it.

Titan pilots nowadays see alot of "miss" messages while shooting subcaps, with current FOTM ab/sig tank combat ships you will only be able to get a "scratch barely" with TPs/webs/neuts (no cap for AB). However this "scratch" will most likely kill the ship.

Most tears about Titans come from those guys that sit in their Drakes/Maelstroms/whatever with zero transversal and MWD on with a sig of a small moons that get blapped right away or the guys "sitting like a boss at zero speed" at any rage. All those guys are called immediately as primary by Supercap pilots. Learn to eve when you cry about that.

Tracking is just a tad bit too good on Titans but those retards as mentioned before will cry for more, no matter what CCP changes.

Instead of nerfing the titans, why not create a ship, module, ability or skill to counterbalance it? A few ideas have already been mentioned in the comments. So there has to be something that CCP could do, or at least try on the test server.I'd rather see something new being added to EvE, rather than taking the hammer to anything seen as a problem. Otherwise the tower will indeed topple ;>

Remove EW invulnerability from Titans... problem solved? I assume they were given EW invuln because back in the day when there were only "supposed" to be a few of them, the EW concentration against them would basically make them useless. Maybe that assumption is incorrect, but now that there are hundreds of them, perhaps its time to remove the immunity.

It may take a simultaneous re-balancing/reworking of how the disparate EW platforms function, but that's probably needed anyway.

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